A large number of products and publications related to locating a desired recipient of an electronic communication exist. A variety of systems exist or have been proposed regarding automatic call forwarding, cellular called party locating, electronic paging of individuals in response to a received message or emails, etc. A wide variety of call processing systems with a wide variety of such features are known.
One example of a feature available with some messaging servers is automatic call distribution (ACD). ACD is particularly useful for distributing calls in a call center. With ACD, calls can be routed to the next available person in the appropriate workgroup or the next available person with the appropriate skills. This is useful for complex call management. For example, ACD can be used to manage a service call into a support hotline which may require being transferred several times to address an issue. However, ACD is generally not helpful for locating a specific person.
Another method commonly used in offices with voice mail systems is to have generally a single administrative person who is presented as a “message taker” for the called party. In such systems, the system may provide a greeting such as: “If you would like to leave a recorded message for this person, press 1; if you would like to speak to someone taking messages for this person, press 2, if you would like to have this person paged, press 3.” In some voice mail systems, the called party may leave such instructions on the outgoing greeting, such as “If you would like to speak to may assistant, John Doe, please press #423.” Both of these methods are inadequate to rapidly locate someone because there is no guarantee that the assistant will be available.
In modern business environments, rapidly locating someone is becoming increasingly more difficult. This is especially true with the reduced levels of administrative support staff found in many offices. It is common to call someone and find them away from their desk. Call forwarding can help, but it does not solve the problem in many situations. For example, if an individual knows that they will be at an alternate work site all day, they may choose to have their calls forwarded from their regular phone number to the alternate phone number. However, if the individual steps away from the phone at the alternate work site, or if the individual fails to properly activate a call-forwarding feature, an urgent or emergency phone call may go unanswered.
In addition, call forwarding services usually manage all incoming calls the same way regardless of their origin. An employee working off-site may be very interested in enabling their manager or spouse to make immediate contact but would prefer to have their co-workers leave a message. Additional services such as call blocking or custom rings can be used in tandem with call forwarding, but they can be inconvenient to use and it can be difficult and time consuming to configure and reconfigure these features.
For urgent contacts, therefore, it is often necessary for the calling party to make multiple sequential phone calls or e-mails to a series of different people who might know where the called party is. This process is time consuming and further may require the called to have maintained an accurate, up-to-date list of alternative contacts for an individual. Creating and maintaining a list of people to contact by phone or e-mail when searching for a particular person can be time consuming, difficult and error-prone. The list may be incomplete, inaccurate, obsolete and/or inappropriate for that situation, thereby reducing the chances of locating the person.
Making multiple sequential contacts to locate a party to receive an urgent call, such as sending multiple e-mails or leaving multiple voice messages can further be problematic because the responses may filter back over a long time period. In trying to locate a party for an emergency contact in the morning, an hour might spent working through a long contact list leaving messages for those contacts that were not available. As a result, responses might filter back all afternoon, long after the party was located or long after the emergency was resolved.
Many of these issues can be dealt with by employing administrative staff to answer phones, manage contact lists and pursue contacts. However, this is an expensive solution.
What is needed is a method or an apparatus for automatically locating a called party via contacts.